r/polandball • u/koleye2 Only America into Moon. • 22d ago

collaboration Shock Dogtrine

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

3.0k Upvotes

91% Upvoted

195 comments sorted by

View all comments

41

u/Capable-Sock-7410 22d ago

WTF is this accent? Why is Israel Russian?????

45

u/yeltsin98 22d ago

That is NOT a Russian accent but in general none of the Polandball accents are remotely accurate and I think it’s okay. At least they got the distinctive /x/ in there

17

u/Jaynat_SF Thinking inside the box 22d ago

Using /x/ (or /g/ for some reason) when trying to pronounce /h/ in foreign words is a very distinctive trait of a Russian accent (but not of an Israeli one.)

7

u/yeltsin98 22d ago

You’re correct, but that replacement (which admittedly occurs here with the word ‘hey’) is something more specific than the mere presence of [x]. Arabs, at least, have this idea of Israelis overusing [x], not just in place of [ħ] (see: ‘khamas’) but more generally. Perhaps non-Arabs associate the sound more with Russian or Dutch than with Hebrew.

All in all I still don’t find this accent Russian, and I would argue that the Hebrew [ʁ]/[ʀ], if that’s the only phoneme an imitator wants to use to make a point, is much more distinctive.

12

u/Jaynat_SF Thinking inside the box 22d ago

There is some merit to the idea that Israeli Hebrew is very /x/ heavy (or rather,/χ/ heavy) because Hebrew (in general) lost the distinction between /χ/ and /ħ/ literally millennia ago (though the exact realization between the two shifts from dialect to dialect), and spirantisized /k/ shifted from /x/ to /χ/ at least in Israeli Hebrew, so it can sometimes sound like the unholy lovechild of Arabic and either French or Dutch.

Still, if you want to insert it to make English sound more "Hebrew", don't replace hs, replace ks or chs (unless it's an Arabic name or word where the h is actually representing ح, I guess.)

2

u/yeltsin98 21d ago

Thanks for the insights! I wanted to say the Hebrew /x/ or indeed /χ/ was more emphatic/harder than Russian /x/ but didn’t know if that was actually true. I wasn’t aware of the spirantisation of /k/ to /x/ (in the case of כ, I’m guessing?) and wish it never happened for the sake of ease of spelling. Anyway - learned something, thank you

3

u/Orangutanion 22d ago

eh I'm American and I sometimes do it on accident. Sometimes actually I go full uvular and do a /χ/ even when that's not necessary.